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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| There's no record that he was "mates" with or even knew Junius |
Well, here's Junius giving him a dedication. Note the phrase which could apply as readily to Jews as to secret Protestants.
EMBLEMA XXVII.
Sermo de Deo apertus, mens sit occulta.
Talk openly about God, but keep your thoughts to yourself.
Ad Iohannem Becanum Medicum clarissimum.[1] |
http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FJUb027
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Whoops, wrong Junius....mmm... this is Hadrianus not Francis.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The central character in all this looks as though it's going to be a bloke called Jan van Vliet. But he has another claim to fame -- he is the source of a very important document called The Ormulum, which is an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon version of the Bible (or something...).
Anyway, the point is that he was so poor when he died that all his goods had to be auctioned off and one such was The Ormulum. But when you read the following, ask yourself:
1 "Is this a description of a work by an eleventh century monk that has survived the ages and that van Vliet somehow forgot to make available /sell/ whatever" or
2. "Is this the working draft of a bloke doing some forgery who died before finishing it/selling it?"
| It seems curious that a text so obviously written with the expectation that it would be widely copied should exist in only one manuscript, and that apparently a draft. Some (e.g. Treharne, 274) have taken this as suggesting that it is not only modern readers who have found the work tedious. Orm himself, however, says in the Preface that he wishes Walter to remove any wording that he finds clumsy or incorrect; this implies that a revision or approval process was anticipated, and it is possible that the Ormulum remained in draft form simply because it never left Walter's possession. |
And by the way, 'Ormulum' means 'Worm' and it's called the Ormulum because it was written by The Worm (he says so at the beginning). And if you think that's a bit of giveaway consider this
| Ole Worm. In 1636 (Amsterdam) Worm published his RUNIR, seu Danica literatura antiquissima, a runic dictionary and Van Vliet owned a copy of it. |
These old rogues sure knew how to enjoy themselves.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | The central character in all this looks as though it's going to be a bloke called Jan van Vliet. |
I wonder about Olaus (Olof) Rudbeck's and Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie's possible connection to all of this - though their dates may be too late.
I was trying to find info online about Hadrianus and got a keen sense of deja lu when reading what little I could find of him - he seems quite similar to Rudbeck, who I read a book about a while ago.
Here's a few details from the book:
- Rudbeck came into possession of a really old Norse document called the Hervararsaga. It's about a sword called the Tyrfing. It was cursed in that once the sword was drawn, it had to take a human life, and then return to its scabbard still red and warm.
- The Hervararsaga manuscript came into his hands in this manner: There was a young Icelandic student named Jonas Rugman. Rugmen was going from Iceland to study at Copenhagen univeristy. Then his ship got blown off course, and he eventually ended up at Uppsala, where he started to work with a guy named Olaus Verelius. Rugman happened to have in his possession "...a chest full of old Icelandic manuscripts! Most of these had never been seen before anywhere outside the small villages and homesteads of Iceland." The Hervararsaga was among these documents. Verelius was an associate of Rudbeck's and he gave the ancient documents to him.
- In addition, Rudbeck was obsessed with proving the historical significance of Sweden. For this project he needed to prove his assumption about the location of Old Uppsala. At just the right time, a document called Bishop Karl's Annotations showed up, proving Rudbeck's assumptions about the location of Old Uppsala. Rudbeck was never officially charged with forgery though.
- One of Rudbeck's main projects was proving that Sweden was Atlantis, and he set out to publish a big expensive book about this. His publishing efforts were funded by Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, who was a longtime patron of Swedish antiquities. De la Gardie was the person who brought the Codex Argenteus back to Sweden.
Also, I found this footnote in a book online (The Origins of Old Germanic Studies in the Low Countries):
| "In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it became important to demonstrate the affliation of one's own language with Gothic. After the Codex Argenteus had returned to Sweden, Olof Rudbeck used it for nationalistic purposes. In England George Hickes coupled Gothic and Old English studies, and in the Netherlands the connection between Dutch and Gothic was studied by Lambert ten Kate." | |
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| As the principal monument of the Gothic language, the Codex Argenteus appealed strongly to Swedish Gothophilia. After Junius had made his transcript, the original had been purchased from Issac Vossius by the Swedish Royal Chancellor, Count Magnus Gabriel De La Gardie. The purchase was made before Junius' edition was actually published in 1665, and De La Gardie therefore received the dedication. The whole manuscript was transcribed by the Uppsala professor Olaus Verelius, and this must have been after it had returned to Sweden before Junius' edition. |
That's from "Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe" by John Considine (page 246). From google book search - I don't think I can actually link to it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It's certainly clear that there is a fairly widespread forgery-of-old-documents industry being carried on. It ought to prove a real goldmine for us because (it would appear) academia just takes them all on trust and has built entire faculties around them.
Now that Gothic has been exposed we can rope in other 'languages' for investigation. There is even the (granted, rather slim) possibility that Anglo-Saxon itself is a made-up language, something I have been toying with for some years but without daring to bring to the forefront of my mind.
We'll need all hands to the pump on this one!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Could someone post this page up, I can't seem to do it (perhaps you can tell me what I'm doing wrong). Then I will comment on it.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3724961
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| Mick Harper wrote: | Could someone post this page up, I can't seem to do it (perhaps you can tell me what I'm doing wrong). Then I will comment on it.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3724961 |
Do you mean post the text of that link into the forum? The page in that link is an image, so the text can't be copied and pasted. If you have image-to-text software, you could save the image and convert it to text.
The next easiest thing to do is to transcribe the part of the text you want into the forum.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Well, I trust you've all read it one way or another. This is the main point I wish to make: if Gothic is a sixteenth century made-up language then it follows that every Gothic document is a forgery -- and we shall have to demonstrate that.
Actually that's not too difficult since the chance of any document surviving since c 400 AD is so small that it makes no sense that any Gothic ones would. Think about it: we have virtually no Latin or Greek documents of this age, only copies made later because Latin and Greek continued to be spoken. But Gothic didn't, so nobody would be copying them....what we have must be fifteen hundred year old survivals. Possible but not very likely, in itself.
Now the Speyer Fragment was found rolled up in the spine of some ancient tome in 1970 so there are three possibilities
1. It is genuine and somehow managed to survive in the (shall we say six hundred years?) period in between being written and monasteries being available to conserve things, then another thousand years in various monasteries. During that time it got separated from the rest of the Codex.
2. It was forged in the sixteenth century and for some reason got separated from the rest of the Codex
3. It was forged in the 1960's and therefore couldn't physically be attached to the Codex..
I think it's pretty obvious if you read the huffings and puffings of the scholars, that it is the third possibility. But note some people think it is not part of the Codex. Imagine that, a tiny handful of fragments make it through fifteen hundred years and we have ended up with two different versions of the same book!
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During his earlier years in England Junius had made a thorough study of the Anglo-Saxon and English language and literature, and one of the results was his publication of the Paraphrase of Caedmon printed at Amsterdam in 1655. Besides this he had made transcripts of many old English manuscripts.1 As a result of his study of the Frisic language he published four works: 1. Leges Frisionum to which he added a Frisic poem of four pages entitled: Hoe dae Friesen Roem wonner; 2. Liber legum et consuetudinum frisicarum, frisice; 3. Leges Frisionum antiquae editae per Sibrand Siccama; and 4. Dictionarium Frisico-Latinum to which he added: Carmina Frisica cum notis Junii ex chartis laceris.
From all this we may draw the conclusion that Junius knew thoroughly the English, the Anglo-Saxon, the Frisic and the Dutch languages and that he was well acquainted with German, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, as being a theologian from Leyden University, and it certainly was a fortunate event in the history of philology that to the able hands of this man came the main codex of the Gothic language. I fear no contradiction when I say that in all Europe hardly could have been found a man to whom the silver-codex could better have been entrusted than to Franciscus Junius. |
http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/vrie035holl01_01/vrie035holl01_01_0006.htm
Maybe his name should be Franciscus Genius.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, this is the big issue. Are there all these genuine manuscripts lying around just awaiting somebody to take an interest in them or is it a coincidence of the most unbelievable kind that a manuscript 'lost' for a thousand years should pop into his hands?
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| In addition, Rudbeck was obsessed with proving the historical significance of Sweden. |
Yes, it seems that Swedish scientists may have been hanging on the coat-tails of Danish counterparts. There was an eminent Danish astronomer called Tygo Brahe who was given an island, called Hveen, on which to build his observatories, between Copenhagen and Scania, the southernmost province of Sweden. He had a constant stream of visitors from all over Europe including James I of England but after Sweden annexed the island in 1660 all traces of Tygo's observatories were destroyed.
Rudbeck was a protege of Queen Christina, the very same queen who owned the Ufilias Bible that found its way into Junius' nephew's hands. And Junius owned the Ormulum, part of his legacy to Oxford.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| on which to build his observatories, between Copenhagen and Scania, the southernmost province of Sweden. |
No, that's my point above -- Scania was part of Denmark until 1658 when it became Swedish. My general point is that Sweden used the concept of "Gothland" to reinforce the idea of Scania being a 'natural' part of Swedish territory ("the territory of the Geats"). [Just by the by, of course, Beowulf is big on the Geats!]
I think (I can't track it down) that it was only the Swedes who started calling the language of the Ulfilas Bible 'Gothic'. And hence the mysterious return of the Bible to Holland for a short period in the 1650's might have been for further doctoring. We need to discover what language Junius claimed the Ulfilas Bible was in. My guess is that he meant it to be in ancient Frisian as part of his campaign to show it was earlier than Greek, Hebrew etc.
PS Tycho's highly exact astronomical measurements led directly to Kepler and the birth of Modern Astronomy. So while 'Gothic' was on its way from Prague to Gothland, the Scientific Revolution was winging its way from Gothland to Prague!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| His (mostly erroneous or biased) attempts to identify and interpret the language sparked the interest of other philologists and can be considered the start of Gothic philology |
Just as I thought. Becanius had no idea that it was Gothic in the 1560's when the Bible first emerged. That means it wasn't even ascribed in any way to Ulfilas at this time. What seems to have happened is that someone acting on behalf of the Swedes in the next century decided that the Bible would be ideal to launch the literary history of the Goths and so declared the Bible to be in Gothic and composed therefore by Ulfilas.
Unless somebody came up with something else it would seem that there is no evidence that this is Gothic (never mind whether it was forged or not).
PS We need to hear more from Komorikid and his errant Greek letters.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| I fear no contradiction when I say that in all Europe hardly could have been found a man to whom the silver-codex could better have been entrusted than to Franciscus Junius. |
Junius was not only employed by Arundel (Howard family) but also by de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The de Vere family were originally from Flanders, one of those families who came over with and were rewarded by William the Conqueror.
| It was a Dutchman by the name of De Busbeck who in the years 1554-1564 found the only place on earth where still lived some remnant of the Gothic people, viz., in a remote corner of the Crimea in Southern Russia, and from these he collected some specimens of the old Gothic language. |
De Busbecq was the Flemish ambassador to the Ottoman court and in his travels came across and transcribed a song in an unknown dialect or language, the so-called 'Crimean Gothic'; who dubbed it thus and when isn't clear, but not Busbecq himself as far as I can tell. A Dutchman or a Swede no doubt.
Junius' transcription despite scholarly encomia is said to have contained numerous errors and subsequent corrections. This does not seem to have applied to his similarly admired Anglo-Saxon studies.
| It seems that the silver-codex did not become the property of Isaac Vossius, but that the great liberality and friendship of the queen Christina, allowed him to borrow it for as long as he liked. This is probable because after ten years, during which time it remained at the home of Vossius and Junius, who lived together, it was returned to the chancellor of Sweden, Count de la Gardie, and probably by his order was given to the University library at Upsala, where it has been kept till the present time. |
This seems to be when the Codex became official as it were, and became the centrepiece of Uppsala Library ever since. De la Gardie himself, a patron of literature and the arts, had an abysmal record in military affairs and was forcibly retired.
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